It’s hard for me to think of the worst/most pittable event of my life, since I really don’t hold grudges at all.
Off the top of my head, the worst would have to be a toss up between two events.
A state finalist in swimming and a national qualifier that same year, I “flunked” my lifeguarding test. The instructor felt up a few girls while practicing saves. He then asked to practice on me. I refused, and offered for another student to practice on me instead. He insisted, and I refused yet again. Days later, he blatantly lied and said I’d done a save incorrectly. Nobody stood up for me. (When good people stand idly by…) It was outrageous. I had a 96% on my written exam. A kid who couldn’t complete two laps of the pool passed.
I bawled the whole way home. My mom blew me off, saying I should have let him do the illicit save. Being 15, I didn’t know how to sue or have a car to drive myself to the Red Cross and complain. It hurts to know you were better than everyone - not in the middle of the pact, but the best - and on a whim, flunked.
Another incident was while I was working in the computer labs while in college a couple years ago. An angry elderly man came into the lab, asked for a floppy drive, and was told (by me) that we didn’t have any. He found a computer with a floppy drive (I was new to this particular lab, it had the oldest computers, there weren’t any other floppy drives on the rest of campus) and proceeded to accuse me of laughing at him. Erm, what? He then screamed his bloody head off at me, making vague threats of me being kicked out of school, etc until my large male coworker got between us and ordered him to leave while I called campus police.
Police come talk to us; he wasn’t even ESCORTED out of the damn building; they just let him go to another lab.
The best part? I run a search of his name and find out he’s not staff, a student, or anything else, but the CHAIR of a department! And because of that (and possibly combined with the fact he’s one of a few minority professors), no action whatsoever was taken by my supervisors in banning him from the computer labs, even though in our handbooks it was made clear that the exact same behavior would result in the permanent expulsion from the computer labs.
I went to my supervisor, who did nothing and gave me NO response to my calls and emails. So I went to HER supervisor, who was furious at my boss, but still took no action, saying that I had to initiate anything against the professor. Uh, how exactly? For going over my supervisor’s head, I was fired - well, I was called into a meeting where I told them I quit, and she angrily told me that no, I was fired.
Either way, the last story (about the incident, not the firing) probably sealed the deal in getting my awesome internship in June.